Is there a way to use Kivy with OpenGL 1.1?

Question

I recently ported an installer from an unmaintainable and complicated batch script to python and thought it would be a nice idea to have a neat graphical front end for the console installer. I decided to use Kivy because I used it for some pet projects at home and I and UI designing went nice and fast.

However, what I did not know until recently, is that Kivy seems only to work with OpenGL 2.0. Unfortunately our company's software is frequently installed on virtual machines and their virtualized graphics adapters often don't support OpenGL that is newer than 1.0 or 1.1 (VirtualBox for example). This prevents the Kivy app from starting or if it does start, doesn't render correctly.

I searched the internet for a way to get Kivy to work without OpenGL 2.0. Some posts on github and I think on reddit suggested to use Angle instead of sdl2 or switching to glew. I tried the suggested solutions but with no success.

I wonder, is there actually a way to get Kivy apps to work without OpenGL 2.0, like OpenGL 1.1 ?

I use Python 3.6.4 and Kivy 1.10.1 on Windows as a dev and target system.

Answer 1

Kivy targets OpenGL ES 2.0 as a minimum version. Note that OpenGL ES is not the same as OpenGL, it's closer to OpenGL 3.0.

This is a minimum required version, anything newer should work fine.

You can use angle on Windows if you want. I think we do it because it's more stable than relying on Windows OpenGL drivers, but I'm not sure.